On Sunday night, Ben Affleck accepted the Academy Award on behalf of his film Argo as it was named the Best Picture of 2012. And today, he appeared on the TED2013 stage kicking off Session 10, “Secret Voices.”

“This is not a TED Talk. I will not be interesting or funny. This will not be exciting in any way,” he said. “Though I feel a little bit like Al Gore in the TED headset. He’s not here, is he?”

And then he gets serious. “At the Academy Awards, I mentioned my wife, and I said: The people we love, we have to work on those relationships,” he said. “The other thing that I work on is Eastern Congo.”

“I felt like I wasn’t doing enough to give back to the world. So I found one of the most damaged, suffering places in the world, where 1 in 5 children die before the age of 5. It’s a place where a million people are displaced, regularly, inside the country. Where there’s the worst gender-based violence in the world … There are a lot of things to lament, particularly in the last 15 years when 5.5 million people died from conflict-related violence.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

As Affleck says, many people object to this number. So he asks us to imagine that the number were 3 million people. Per capita, that would be roughly the equivalent of 12 million people in the United States. “That’s the population of Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia,” he says. “If they had every single person who lived there die, we would probably take some steps. There would be a reaction.”

So why haven’t we responded?

“I think we are a naturally good people. We care about one another. When our neighbor has cancer, we go over with meatloaf and take care of their kid,” says Affleck. “I think what happens [when we think about the Congo] is that we feel it’s too big, it’s too difficult to look at … I can understand my aunt who passed away, but 3 million deaths I can’t understand. I don’t want to understand — it’s just too painful, so I disengage.”

Too many people say that the situation in the Congo can’t be changed and that corruption runs too deep.

Tonight, Affleck is here to show us just a scratch off the surface of the amazing things happening in the Congo. And with that, he introduced the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste, from the Congo, playing a composition called “Luba.”

In crisp suits, the musicians made beautiful music — their strings diving and soaring with beauty. And hope.

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the contenders for Best Picture this morning, we noticed two familiar faces in the field. We were pleased to see the stylish thriller Argo among the nominees, as director Ben Affleck shared with us the “8 TED Talks that amazed me” in the fall. We were also excited to see that Beasts of the Southern Wild, executive produced by longtime TED community member Philipp Engelhorn, got a Best Picture nod. A visually stunning film with an 8-year-old star (who this morning became the youngest Best Actress nominee ever), Beasts tells the story of a fantasty America where a levee divides Louisiana from flood land, but many choose to live their lives past its reach. It’s a beautiful, powerful and truly creative film.

Congratulations to all the filmmakers behind Argo and Beasts, as well as to those who created fellow nominees Amour, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty and Les Miserables.

And we’d like to thank the Academy for this TED Talk.

Don Levy: A cinematic journey through visual effects
How far have visual effects come in the 110 years since Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon? In this talk from TED2012, Don Levy takes us on a journey, created with the help of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.]]>http://blog.ted.com/the-oscars-best-picture-field-contains-two-tedsters/feed/4Oscar-nomineeskatetedOscar-nominees